Riverbend - Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq

ADVANCE PRAISE FORBAGHDAD BURNING

Passionate, frustrated, sarcastic, and sometimes hopeful. Riverbend is most compelling when she gives cultural object lessons on everything from the changing status of Iraqi women to Ramadan, the Iraqi educational system, the significance of date palms and the details of mourning rituals. The blog offers quick takes on events from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored, or suppressed.

Publishers Weekly

In a voice that grips with drama and cuts to core with humor, Riverbend reports the personal side of war as no other account I know of does. Anyone who cares about the war in Iraq must read this book.

Susan Sarandon

Ive learned more about the occupation of Iraq from Riverbends blog than from just about any other news source. This 24-year-old Baghdad woman writes about everything from her house-proud neighbor, the Martha Stewart of Iraq, to the rising toll of kidnappings, murders, and attacks on unveiled women by the religious fanatics whose empowerment is one of the many unintended consequences of the American invasion. With spiritedness and even humor, she writes about daily life under siege and families under incredible stress. Every American should read this book.

Katha Pollitt

Baghdad Burning is an amazing testimony from a young woman who reports from the front and center of the terrible occupation of her homeland. Riverbend makes an astute witness as her country is disassembled right by right and family by family by the self-righteous invaders who believe they are heroes taking what belongs to them by divine right. As I read her brilliant, honest daily account in her ongoing blog, I am often struck by dj vu. I recognize the same basic stories of theft and destruction. It is all happening all over again.

Joy Harjo, poet and musician

Sometimes the world has to wait years before the victims of war tell their stories. Riverbends tale comes right at us, fresh, furious, and demanding. You are about to make a friend and youll never watch the news the same way again. Thank you, Riverbend, for the generous gift of your words. Your dignity, irony, rage, and extravagant humanity may yet liberate us from denial: U.S. OUT OF IRAQ NOW.

Laura Flanders, Air America Radio

Embedded in an undisclosed location (her home) in Baghdad, the mysterious Riverbend provides the most incisive, heart-wrenching, and even comical accounting of the shocking and awful invasion of her country. Whatever Riverbends true identity, she has an uncanny ability to convey, in spectacularly rich English, the daily deprivations of living in an occupied Iraq. Its a must read for all peace activists.

Medea Benjamin, cofounder, Code Pink

Riverbends humanity, rather than any ideology, permeates her writing. Her words put us right at her kitchen table, listening to her experiences of daily life under occupation, and make us taste the reality of the war in Iraq.

Yifat Susskind, Associate Director, MADRE

This is the 21st-century version of Anne Franks Diaryand we can only hope that this story ends less tragically. Riverbenda smart, hip, educated, feminist, 25-year-old Iraqi bloggercan really write, and her terrifying, funny, deeply moving reports of what daily life under U.S. attack and occupation is really like are utterly unique. Buy it. Read it. Tell everyone you know about it.

Robin Morgan, Global Editor, Ms. Magazine

Buy this book. Read it. Share it. Assign it. Quote it. Act on it. This savvy Iraqi author, going by the nom de blog of Riverbend, has given us an amazing gift full of political immediacy, personal candor and feminist insight. We should make the most of it.

Cynthia Enloe, author of The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire

Will an airplane ever sound the same again? Will anyone ever be just 13 again? These are the sort of poignant questions raised by Riverbend in her account of quotidian life under U.S. military occupation in present-day Iraq, which make her book a must-if-painful read. This young female Iraqis perspective on the U.Ss war on terror explodes the stereotypes of oppressed Arab (or Iraqi) women by telling us how she had a good job and independent life before the Occupation, whereas now she is unemployed and afraid to go out unescorted by a male. This is how we have liberated Iraq and her women! I salute Riverbend for her courage in telling it as it is, and for maintaining a sense of humor in the midst of horror and deprivation which she describes for us in a style at once raw and witty.

Fawzia Afzal-Khan, editor of Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out

Riverbends online journal exposes what liberation is really like for the Iraqi people. She talks about the fear, uncertainty, and harassment that the Iraqis are living with, a story we dont see reported by the major media or the government/military. Her voice is especially unique because she is a young woman, and she tells what the occupation is like for young women, challenging our governments assertion that our invasion of Iraq has liberated women. Riverbends journals let people in the United States and elsewhere read what it is like to live in Iraq and this helps us to better understand the resistance against our presence there and also to humanize and relate to the Iraqi people. Despite the ten months I spent in Iraq, and all of the contact I had with the people, I have learned more reading Riverbends blog than I ever understood from the stunted communication I had with Iraqis while I was there. When I read Riverbends journal entries, Im struck that she seems like a normal person trapped in a very abnormal, difficult situation. Her writings should dispel the belief among Americans that the Iraqi people are somehow so different from us in every aspect of their lives, that it is impossible to understand them. Identifying with the Iraqi people is a crucial step in ending the occupation, and I think Riverbends journals are an important way for people to gain insight into the lives of a people living under foreign occupation.

Kelly Dougherty, cofounder, Iraq Veterans Against the War

Baghdad Burning

GIRL BLOG FROM IRAQ

by Riverbend

Foreword by Ahdaf Soueif
Introduction by James Ridgeway

The Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
New York

Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10016

www.feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition, 2005

Copyright 2005 by Riverbend

Foreword copyright 2005 by Ahdaf Soueif

Introduction copyright 2005 by James Ridgeway

Copyright information for excerpted material that appears in this volume appears on which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in an information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Riverbend.

Baghdad burning : girl blog from Iraq / by Riverbend ; foreword by Ahdaf Souief ; introduction by James Ridgeway. 1st Feminist Press ed.